BRAVE, Episode Three - the Color of Danger (2 page)

He took a few minutes to stir more cream into his cup and then sipped, considering. “You don’t think I can take care of myself? And of you?”

One arm crept around her middle, supporting her bandaged ribs. She leaned forward and tears came into her eyes. She shook her head. “Why should you, Logan? Why should you get all tangled up in my messes, when it’ll only mean more mess for you?”

Stormy weather had intensified and the rain flowed from the gutters and pelted down against the windows. The wind had risen, hurling bits and pieces through the streets: fallen leaves, soggy papers, crumpled-up gum wrappers, and plastic drinking straws.

Despite the clamor outside, he looked at her with a deliberate expression. It sent heat flooding through her and dried up every drop of saliva—all in a good way.

“I think you know why,” he answered. “Do I have to spell it out for you?”

She longed to explore this personal angle, but things moved too fast. Slow down. Take it easy. Hadn’t she already chastised herself for poor choices?

“Not yet, please. Once my life has settled a bit, then we,” she drew in a quick breath and resumed earnestly, “Logan, I’ve seen what he’s done to me and to others. He’s sick. He’s completely beyond reason. He’d sooner push you straight out into traffic than walk around you at the curb.”

“Uh-huh.” His gaze ranged over her troubled, bashed-up face – was he memorizing her features?

She basked in his attention, daring to imagine there might come a time when she could be free of David Halterman. And of Jonathan Maynard. But how would that be possible, short of relocating to the Mt. Everest? Even then David would ferret her out. He had unlimited means and time and a bizarre, burning need to possess her.

“Am I supposed to be afraid too?” Logan asked. There wasn’t a hint of fear in him.

“Oh, Logan, I don’t know!” she half-wailed. “For two years I’ve glanced back over my shoulder each time I left the house, expecting he’d show up with a gun. Or it would be someone he’d hired to do his dirty work. Do you think I want to put you through that? Do you think I want to be responsible for anything happening to you? Please, Logan, listen to me.”

He pushed back his chair and came to her side, a medieval knight to serve his lady. There was so much tough and hard about Logan, from the rough-and-tumble hair to the black ink tattoos to the stand-out muscles. Chloe’s father wouldn’t have approved of this stranger who’d gained access to his daughter’s life; too crude, too low-class, too obviously from the wrong side of the tracks.

And yet there was the gentleness, the caring and compassion shining through, contrasting that rough exterior.

“Chloe,” he whispered. He squatted down beside her and slipped one arm around her shoulders. She quivered at the touch, the weight of him around her. God, he smelled like heaven. “Chloe, you gotta trust me. And you gotta trust yourself. Nothin’ is goin’ to happen to me, I swear it. I won’t let anything happen to you either. Can’t you believe that?”

The tears overflowed. “I want to, Logan,” she answered. “I really want to. But I’ve known you less than twenty-four hours. I’ve known David for more than five years.”

His gaze shifted from her tragic eyes to the window opposite, sheeted in rain for a moment. Silence hung thick. He pursued some private strategy and she couldn’t follow him there.

“Okay,” he said, reaching a decision.

“Okay…what? That sounds as if—”

“Yeah, it does, doesn’t it?” Rising, he stretched out one long arm, snagged his cell phone—a sophisticated cell phone, the newest model—and aimed it in her direction. Click! Click! Like a Hollywood set manager. “Good, good; very good. Now, turn toward the light.” More instructions, more clicks, more encouragement.

“Logan, I really don’t think,”

“Sure you do. Now stand up. No, no rush, hang onto the back of the chair if you need to. Now raise the pj top.”

Chloe frowned. “I am not about to.”

“Yeah, you are. There, that’s fine, just enough to show the bandages. Relatively painless, too.” Satisfied, he snapped the little device shut and put it aside. “After we remove the tape around your ribs, I’ll get some more shots.”

“What, with me half-bare? I don’t think that’s—”

“It is,” he said firmly. “It’s called proof and it’s absolutely necessary. Okay, enough of that, Chloe. C’mere.”

He extended his hand to hers and led her over to the couch. A gust of wind hurled rain hard at the windows, it spattered like hailstones, and she shivered. She liked this man, his strong personality, his confidence, but she was sapped. There wasn’t must energy in her and it couldn’t just be the nasty weather outside. Life confused her. Why had she met him? And now of all times, when she was at her most desperate.

He settled her down under the afghan’s warmth and squirreled himself in beside her, recreating last night’s scene.

“Okay, talk. You’ve got more to tell me, I can see that. What you said last night didn’t empty you out.”

Was he a mystic? Or had he gotten to know her that well in such a short time? Either way, he was far too cheery for this early in the damn morning. She stifled a yawn past the coffee.

“You’re a morning person, aren’t you?” She gave him a sideways scowl.

“Guilty. Sorta goes with the job, y’know? Why, does that bother you?”

She sighed. “I’m not.”

“Oh, well.” He grinned at her as if there were nothing more important in the world right now. “We’ll work it out.”

“Logan…”

“Uh-huh. What, some other earth-shakin’ event?”

Aslow flush rose to stain the curves of both cheekbones, she dared not meet his friendly gaze. “Is there—do you have anyone in your life?”

“A woman, you mean? Other than you? Nope. Stop stallin’, Chloe. Spill.”

Logan took up her small hand in his. Thumb to thumb, length of finger to length of finger, lifeline to lifeline and palm to palm, he matched each part of the whole and folded them together, then stroked her. It was one of the most erotic non-sexual sensations, and a jolt of electricity charged from her belly to her breasts.

Logan smiled. Not in a snide, know-it-all way, but with the upbeat candor, reveling making someone else happy.

“Okay, you flatfooted interrogator. You win. I’ll talk.”

“Attagirl.” He laced his fingers through hers again, then scrunched comfortably in place.

She stared down at their linked hands, and gathered her thoughts. “There was so much about David that I could never tell anyone,” she murmured. “I guess it’s been bottled up since I ran away. You know that no matter how hard I tried to please him, I don’t think my father ever really approved of me. I know that David didn’t. He wanted me only because he couldn’t have me.”

David loved just one woman. His mother. And that was exactly the way she liked it. She’d taught him to believe that no one else would ever be good enough to meet his impossibly high standards.

“I didn’t realize all this until much later,” she confided.

“No wonder he turned out so ugly,” Logan gave his blunt opinion. “What a sick relationship.”

David knew, with the supreme confidence of an egomaniac, whatever he coveted would be his; if not, then it wasn’t worth having. By his sixteenth birthday, he was caught up in the net of excused by his parents as boyish behavior: boozing and using, carousing, games of chance, sex with loads of willing partners. He crashed the flashy Audi his father had bought him. His punishment? He survived the accident. The replacement model, purchased within a week, was a year older.

His substance abuse and physical abuse went hand in hand. He left behind the wreckage of two more totaled cars, an early failed marriage, three discarded girlfriends (and the miscarriage of one), broken promises, and personal bankruptcy.

To some, first on the college campus and then later in the surrounding community, the scandals clinging to his coattails only made him more exciting. To naïve Chloe, the rumors and aspersions had been spread by jealousy. No one was that heinous.

Logan pursed his lips into a soundless whistle. “Geez. This guy’s a real piece of work, isn’t he? D’ja feel sorry for him, Chloe?”

“Dumb ass,” she muttered. “I was such a total dumb ass.”

“It’s allowed,” he told her gently. “We all get to make those mistakes. It’s called growin’ up and gettin’ mature.”

“Pfffft. I believed every lie he told me. At least, until after we were married.”

His infidelities started just after they returned from their honeymoon.

“Actually, I think they started
during
our honeymoon,” she reflected. She didn’t let a hint of how that had devastated her as a new wife. She’d been so trusting, so ready for that life-long commitment with a gorgeous man. The man of her dreams. “Times he was gone for a while, leaving me alone in the room, or on Flamenco Beach, in Puerto Rico. When he returned, he always had this sort of a—I don’t know…smug look on his face, and I’d catch a whiff of some exotic perfume.”

“Bastard,” Logan spat. “It’s tough enough thinkin’ that might be true; it’s a lot tougher havin’ to find out it is.”

“Bet your bumpus it is. And so it went.”

But the extramarital sex in his social circle couldn’t prevent David’s jealousy. He criticized the clothing she wore, the stores she shopped in, the friends she chose, even the charitable events she went to. He made her small so he could be big. Better than her. He read her emails, listened to her phone calls, ordered her secretary to report on her whereabouts any time she was away from the desk.

He could do whatever he wanted and she couldn’t.

“I felt so stifled. There wasn’t a chance for our marriage to grow. There wasn’t a chance for
me
to grow.”

Logan’s left hand was still entwined with hers. He slipped his right arm around her shoulders. “Seems t’me the best thing anybody could hope for from their union is a partnership. This guy didn’t know what he was missin’ out on. Anything else from old macho superboy Halterman?”

Her fingers tightened through his. She confessed in a low voice, “We never really made love, Logan. He took me without ever a care as to what I was feeling, or what I preferred, or whether he even satisfied me. I simply submitted, because that was the easiest. And the safest.”

In the two years since her midday flight from the Chicago shores, there’d been no other man in her life. Or her bed. There was once the remote possibility of that. Jonathan Maynard had sure worked hard enough for it, but after that horrendous scene at the club, he’d been interrupted and completely extinguished by Camille. Now, that was a good friend if ever there was one.

Jonathan’s touch revolted her.

Did she really want to let on to Logan how inexperienced she was?

Chloe worked her way through the maze of her matrimony, instead. Her past was a mine field littered with explosives and she was warrior armed only with wit – maybe not so much of that either. “I never understood why he’d even married me. There were plenty of other women available—beautiful, clever, charming women, with more money and political pull. When I asked him, he gave me the only reason he had: his mother had decided it was time he settled down, and I was at least presentable.”

Logan muttered something under his breath. Something pungent and unflattering.

“After a year of David’s drunkenness, and his rages, and his beatings,” she continued, lost in distant memory, “I asked him for a divorce. I begged him for a divorce.”

“Men like that will never let a woman go.” He shifted position, glanced out at the pouring rain. “Especially if it’s your decision. Makes him look weak, less powerful, less in control. Shows a chink in his armor, y’know. Probably made him madder.”

“You’re right. That was one of the worst attacks.” A shudder at remembered pain and fear, at remembered helplessness. “He didn’t want to cause any damage to himself that time, because he had a business luncheon to attend, so he didn’t use his fists. He used a tennis racquet. The broken arm and concussion sent me to the hospital.”

Every muscle in Logan’s body went rigid at her dispassionate re-telling of old traumas.

“He worked a lot,” Chloe went on, after a minute. “In fact, that was his saving grace—he worked hard. His father’s business had earned a good living, but David built it up even more and got to be very, rich. I think that’s been his only real goal.”

Logan’s semi-smile twisted with irony. “Piss in the eye for his old man,” he suggested.

“Oh, no doubt.” She sighed and leaned back. She loved the weight of his sturdy shoulder tight against hers, and the caress of his hand enclosing her fingers. “And there you have it, Logan. All the sordid details of my former life.”

She was emptied out, from top to bottom, and ready to leave the loathsome past behind for a new beginning. She raised her shadowed eyes to his. Any sign of disgust or aversion? No. She should’ve known better. Logan Farrow was fresh ad uncomplicated, and she was drawn to him like refined metal to a lodestone.

“Are you divorced now?” he asked quietly. Why did he want to know? She pressed hope down within – don’t be ridiculous!

“Yes. My friend—remember Barbara?—she helped me with the paperwork, and all the details.”

“Good. I wouldn’t want to be takin’ up with a married woman.”